Mostly WordPress plus some other random thoughts and musings …

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WordPress

I use WordPress for a number of hobby projects. In the course of doing so I have found reason to build my own themes and write several plugins.

WordPress Themes

A while back I used the Sandbox theme framework to develop several themes. Sandbox is no longer being developed so I am moving my themes over to Twenty-Ten. Fortunately I don’t think it will impact these themes too much but I am not sure when I will find the time to update them all.

Sandbox LEGO

Sandbox Soccer

CASL Soccer

WordPress Plugins

wp-SwimTeam

Email Users

WordPress Google Form

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26 thoughts on “WordPress”

I’ve installed you calendar plus and I have it working well in the side bar. I am not sure how to get a full page display or to integrate a google calendar. I was actually looking for some documentation on working with the calendar plus plugin.

As I noted in a post a while back, someone registered a new plugin called Calendar-Plus in the WordPress plugin repository so I ended up renaming mine to Enhanced Calendar. Are you working with the correct plugin? There isn’t any integration with Google Calendar in the original Calendar plugin and the plugin I wrote doesn’t change that. Lately I’ve been using the Google Calendar Widget & Short Code to embed Google Calendars into WordPress. The way the Calendar plugin is coded makes it challenging to “enhance” and the author doesn’t seem to have much interest in changing it.

You need to add the language parameter to the form URL. You would append “&hl=fr” to the form URL to display in it French. I am not sure what all of the language codes are though. I changed my Sample Form and added “&hl=fr” to the URL and you can see that some of the Google Messages are now in French. I am not sure if I can force Google to translate my questions and/or responses but I think you’ll need to do something this.

I am using the email user feature to send out emails to members of our organisation. We want to list our emails in a post so member can go to the archive of posts rather than having to repeat ourselves. When I send an email from a post the HTML formate of the email gets stripped away but when I do an an email from email users in the dashboard it goes with HTML format. Can I get the emial from the post to include the HTML so we can get nice formatting.

As long as you have the email format sent to HTML the email from a Post Notification should go out in HTML format too. Do you have the “enable short code processing” option turned on? That can have an effect if your posts make use of short codes. The only other option would be if something (another plugin or your theme) has defined a the_content() filter which is stripping away some of the formatting you want to preserve.

The debug feature can be useful for chasing down the problem without blasting a lot of email to your users.

WordPress defines many actions and filters, the_content is one of them. A plugin or theme can define a hook connected to the_content which will then allow the plugin or theme to processs the content of a post prior to be it being rendered. Refer to the WordPress Documentation for more details. It is hard to know for sure where, where, if at all, a the_content filter is being run from. There is a way to cause WordPress to report active filters but I don’t recall what it is off the top of my head.

Email Users has a setting on the Dashboard (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users) for the mail format (text or HTML) so there shouldn’t be any need for the snippet you show above unless something else on your site is somehow overriding the mail format.

With respect to your comment on TinyMCE, I am not sure what you are referring to. Do you have a special TinyMCE plugin loaded?

I have that feature in email users turned on but something else in my theme or plugins over rides the email user settings. I have TnyMCE editor plugin still install from before the current wordpress version which has the setting I mentioned. It now works okay and I posted this in case anyone else has the same issue.

Hi Michael! I am using your “Email users” plugin but it seems just to work for me as admin and not for my authors. I want to enable them to write each other a note when they write a new post aswell. What do I have to change in that case? Do they all have to be admin, or can I male the plugin available for them aswell? Thank you for your notice! 🙂 keep up the great work!

Email Users supports a number of capabilities which can be assigned to various users and/or roles. If you visit the Email Users settings page (Dashboard > Settings > Emails Users) and scroll to the bottom of the page, the various supported capabilities are outlined. Email Users does not have functionality to assign these capabilities to users but there are a number of other plugins available for this specific purpose.

Google Forms, as provided by Google Docs, collect their data and drop it into a spreadsheet with each field representing a column in the spreadsheet. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anyway to deviate from this behavior without doing some Google Apps scripting and even then, I am not sure what would be possible. You can design your form however you see fit in Google Docs and for the most part, can render it much the same way using the Google Forms plugin. There are frequently some limitations based on how your theme is designed which impact how the end form appears for the user.

One thing the Google Forms plugin does is allow you to “columnize” a form. There isn’t much (any?) control over where the columns break and setting up your input fields so the form is rendered in columns, while possible, is a trial and error process to get it to look correct.

Hi Mike . . . I’ve been told by my IT dept. that I have to use your Google Forms plugin on the new WordPress site we are developing. I have no coding experience, so I was quite intimidated when I looked at your plugin’s interface–it’s all greek to me. Do you have any documentation that is more for the novice? Thanks . . .

There is tons of information spread across the comments section here and the plugin Support Forum on WordPress.org. Usage of the plugin is actually pretty straightforward, a lot of what you see on the Dashboard when setting up a form is optional. In fact, all but two (2) fields are optional. The required fields are:

The form title (similar to a WordPress post or page)

The published URL from Google Drive for your form. This is the URL you would send someone if you shared your Google Form and sent the link via email.

That is it. Everything else is optional for the most part UNLESS your form looks awful on your site in which case you’ll want to define some custom CSS. But even IF the form looks awful, it should still work provided everything is configured correctly on your server and your theme or another plugin isn’t doing something it shouldn’t do (like make multiple calls to wp_header() or wp_footer() or something like that).

Once you have those two fields filled out you can publish your form (again, like you publish a post or a page) and test it using the “View Google Form” button which is presented once the form is published.

The form itself is designed in Google Drive like you normally wood however if you are setting up a new form, make sure to downgrade it to the older version of Google Forms. Google recently made an update to Google Forms and the new forms change how buttons are defined which is currently unsupported. See this post for more information on downgrading Google Forms.

Dear Michael, I am using Google Forms plugin. The button Submit is not active when I am using wpgform short code, in your example with gform submit button is working. CURL is enabled, Form is published. I tried everything what I could find on the internet and in the readme file, but no luck.

Wow, you are amazing for crafting this for us! So appreciated. For some reason my new Google Form’s “downgrade” button was grayed out, (To match my non functional submit button, I think..) But luckily I had an old form that I COULD downgrade, and copied that, and then pasted info into it. Now I’ve got an active form on my website, unfortunately the form boxes are wabi-sabi all over the place. Any work-around getting them in line? Messing w margins or making a rule that boxes are a certain size, or show up after the question (as opposed to before and after, depending on question length)

Google appears to have moved the downgrade option again. I just wrote a post where I walk through the steps on how to downgrade.

With regards to your question about how the form actually looks on your site, I would need to see it to suggest a solution. You will typically have to define some Custom CSS to make the form compatible with your theme.

I wanted embed my google form into word press (4.9.1) website and I have followed instructions given by you and I could see the google form on my website but style for radio button,checkbox and submit button are missing after that also check for jquery related errors on chrome development tool and I came across “Added non-passive event listener to a scroll-blocking ‘touchstart’ event. Consider marking event handler as ‘passive’ to make the page more responsive. See https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5745543795965952” and when I research on that it is related to performance of website. Could you please suggest what went wrong with my website that it not showing desired google forms .